ConVirt: the New Tool in Your Virtual Toolbox

Note that
in order to migrate running guests between hosts, both hosts must have
access to the same shared storage. You may run into other limitations
when migrating guests, such as both hosts must have the same processor
type and/or must be on the same hypervisor platform (like KVM or Xen), so plan
accordingly. I was unable to determine whether this was a technical limitation
or an unlocked feature in the enterprise version of ConVirt. Either way,
there are some native tools in the hypervisors that can convert foreign
disk/VM types for importation into their native platform. After you have
met all the prerequisites, migrating is as simple as right-clicking
the guest and selecting your destination server. You can monitor your
migration task in the bottom pane of the console.

One last feature I want to mention is ConVirt's management of shared
storage, because I think it is useful (Figures 8 and 9). With the designer's
tree-based approach to organizing virtual resources, you set shared
storage at the Data Center-level and then attach it to Server Pools, which
gives you the ability to mix and match your storage among the pools. Be
aware that for all servers in the pool to use the storage, they must
connect to the storage using the same logical path (like migration). I
found this feature incredibly useful as it really simplifies assignment of
any networked storage resources you have in your environment (SAN, iSCSI or
NFS). You also can set certain provisioning settings at the pool level
that override those in a template. This means you can provision
the same template with multiple storage options. This would
be very handy if you have Server Pools in different sites or different
departments, each that should use their own storage resources.

Figure 8. Shared Storage Details

Figure 9. Server Pools That Can Use This Storage

In this article, I've touched on many of the nicer features in ConVirt,
but now let me talk about some things that are missing. Before doing so,
you should recognize that I am comparing apples and oranges when I
talk about ConVirt and vendor-produced management tools. Even comparing
the Enterprise version of ConVirt is not wholly accurate, as ConVirt is
meant to manage a heterogeneous virtual environment whereas Microsoft
and VMware are tuned to their own homogeneous platforms.

That being said,
I still had a few gripes with ConVirt. The first is that it
requires root access to managed servers to communicate with the CMS, which
I am sure most admins won't be crazy about. Snapshot support
also is noticeably missing from the open-source version. There is an option
available for the VMs called Hibernate, but that takes a snapshot
only of the running memory not the underlying disk. The lack of snapshots
bothered me only for half-a-second when I realized it is available in the
Enterprise version. The last item missing from ConVirt is administrative
roles. You do have the ability to create users and groups in the console,
but as far as I can tell, the only thing that gets you is auditing
of the tasks that take place on the CMS server. It felt like this was
added into the product in its most basic form, but never fully developed.

In the end, these are minor complaints as ConVirt provides far more utility
than the few features it lacks. The software really gives you a lot of
flexibility, especially with KVM, and you can't beat the price point. I'm
sure those features unlocked in the Enterprise version (snapshots,
high availability and spanned virtual networks) are worth the money and
bring it more in line with the vendor-produced management offerings. I
know how much VMware costs, and I am sure ConVirt comes in under that. I
will say that you really need to know your chops when managing different
hypervisors at the same time. I am one of those admins who works with
vSphere daily, and I have become accustomed to a homogeneous environment,
so I really had to get under the hood of both KVM and Xen to make things
go smoothly. That being said, once it in place, I believe it is easier
to administer by non-Linux IT pros or admins who need to perform day-to-day
tasks in their virtual environment than virt-manager or command-line tools. Add in the ability to manage a multiplatform hypervisor
environment, and the value of ConVirt is apparent.

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